Search results will now show both multiple prospects and multiple sources, culled of a list of pre-approved data sources, to show Bing users various sides of issues ranging from the benefits and downsides of kale to the pros and cons of controversial political issues. This builds on an advanced feature, announced back in September, in which Bing added fact checks to search results in an effort to lower down on misinformation, fake news, and other distorted accounts from manipulative information sources.
In a new business with social news site Reddit, Bing will also surface data from subreddits right in search results by using algorithms to view and analyze the user-generated text across Reddit’s many societies. The integration includes AMA questions and replies populated within the search card for popular celebrities, AskReddit-sourced responses to broad service questions, and top threads for specific subreddits that will display up in search results just by searching the name of the community.
Another AI-powered Bing feature is a new conversational search function, powered by the learnings Microsoft achieved from deploying natural language chatbots like Xiaoice and Zoand using machine learning algorithms on billions of text records. The company’s search engine will now deploy a more exceptional form of auto-complete to help users better phrase a query to get a more desirable answer on the first search. Similarly, Bing’s more robust image search function, trained on object recognition models, will be able to better recognize objects in photos, including products worn by people highlighted in the photo, and landmarks.
The conversational and intelligent search will both be coming to US Bing users in the next month, while Bing’s enhanced image search is available now. Microsoft is also bringing intelligent search to Office 365 products, including OneDrive and SharePoint, to let users explore for text within image and presentation slides.
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